Response 2: The Neoliberal Dystopian Present and Utopian Reactions

The twenty-first century’s shifting intellectual framework is accompanied by shifts in the character of current dystopian fiction. Contemporary society is now characterized by globalization in which privatization, consumerism, and neoliberal politics prevail. We are witness to a faltering Western progressivism, massive economic recessions, the expansion of alt-right ideologies, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian incursion into Ukraine, and the war in Gaza. Thus, neoliberalism plays a key role in the depiction of current fictional dystopias that commonly reflect society and are known to instill authority through ideological and social domination.In their interview with Rocío Carrasco, Larissa Lai and Sherryl Vint discuss how Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope might still link us to the desires and aspirations of new formations of utopia. According to Vint, Bloch “differentiates concrete from abstract [in] that concrete utopianism is about hope for a different kind of future, specifically for a transformed world.”1 The use of hope to transform one’s world is a key notion underlying Paulo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Windup Girl (2009). The novel takes place in a distant future at the capital of the Thai Kingdom, Bangkok. Its plot opens up various resistant possibilities for the protagonist, Emiko, a so-called windup girl or genetically engineered Japanese “New Person” who lives illegally in the city as, essentially, a sex slave. To preserve her life she learns during the day hours to pass as a human being, while working at night in a brothel as “freak entertainment.” All the while, however, she dreams of escaping to a rumored utopian village inhabited solely by other New People.Emiko’s plight is initially focused on survival and on constructing a space free from dystopian confines; the remaining characters are consumed with navigating their energy-deficient, ecologically hostile environment while promoting their own self-interests (namely, social status and power). The novel quickly establishes the tension between these human citizens and the wind-up girl, whom the Thai Kingdom deems acceptable only because she serves a utilitarian purpose. Any who do not are regarded as a threat to the regime’s order. Emiko’s situation aligns precisely with Larissa Lai’s description of the posthuman figure as a raced and gendered body colonized by “capitalist expansion [which] creates new territories within the biology of the body.” Larissa Lai observes in the interview with Vint that “those beings among us that can’t be covered by the paradoxes of representation” adhering to rights discourse, who fall outside of that discourse, inhabit “precisely those sites where we are being both exploited and remade anew. They are also the sites where I seem to feel the imperative to find a speaking self.” This statement is precisely relevant to the treatment of Emiko throughout the novel: she is simultaneously “used” at the brothel and rejected generally by human society within the Thai Kingdom and Japan as “subhuman.” However, Emiko too uses this site to “find a speaking self,” to transform her subjugation into agency, thereby creating her own sense of subjective selfhood.Emiko originally believes that her subservient and horrific treatment in society was due to her genetic modification, which endowed her with certain attributes and personality traits. Yet she realizes that her “strangling strands of her engineered DNA” are not the “cause” of her oppression: it is rather her socialization, which grooms and trains her to “serve,” by a neoliberal society that commodifies her.2 Not all behavior has been programmed into her: she is more sentient than humanity gives her credit for and seems to have a “soul”—allowing for the possibility of free will and agency.She becomes self-assertive and empowered as she starts to embrace her embodiment not as a prison but as a gift: “She is New People, and she moves through the crowds so smoothly that they do not know she is there. She laughs at them. Laughs and slips between them. [. . .] They simply do not recognize how she graces them.”3 For precisely this reason, Emiko and other posthumans cannot be “properly” subjugated within a neoliberal dystopian structure. Emiko, as a New Person who no longer desires to pass, is able to move smoothly through the masses undetected and unrecognized with a jouissance tied to her transgression and unknowability. Her laughter at some times is Bakhtinian: a subversive, ambivalent act that “is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.”4 Such laughter places Emiko as part of this society, while enabling her to transgress previously imposed social norms.However, accepting one’s true nature does not completely dismantle dystopian society, it is simply the beginning of resistance. Emiko struggles against the institutional power present within the Thai Kingdom and contributes to what Michel Foucault determines as a multiplicity of “points of resistance [that] are present everywhere in the power network.”5 Emiko’s resistance to Thai society and its power network is effective as “mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society—that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings,” which can undermine the network of power relations by traversing “social stratifications.”6 Her modes of resistance are fluid and multiple, as Emiko slowly whittles away at her oppressors by producing minute fractures in their control over her.Her first attempt to gain freedom is by asking Anderson (her white lover and protector) to help her escape from her living conditions and travel to the mythical New People village. The rumor of this village becomes the focus of her hope, transforming Emiko’s navigation of her dystopian milieu—and seeking out paths toward the village. Despite Anderson’s prediction that a possible change in government within the Thai Kingdom might clear her path, Emiko, characteristically (by training) compliant, challenges the relevance of this possibility to her:In this interaction, Emiko’s double consciousness8 is evident as she struggles with her desire for freedom and her ingrained submissiveness to social norms. Anderson’s “fantasy” speaks to the privilege and power afforded by his social identity, as he—also an outsider—manages to thrive while Emiko is “begging for survival.” She recognizes that, regardless of any new rule and leadership, this neoliberal hierarchization will always grant her an inferior position versus natural humans. Her only opportunity for freedom is to withdraw from such a society and seek a community in which she is no longer inferior, commodified, and enslaved. Thus, desire and hope for utopia must drive her forward:Emiko produces a mobile and transitory resistance, quite literally by her desire to move and leave. She forces herself to “recognize that she is no longer a slave [. . .] She is something else. Something different. Optimal in her own way. And if she was once a falcon tethered, Gendo-sama has done one thing she can be grateful for. He has cut her jesses. She can fly free.”10 Within the novel, the networks of power utilize humanistic principles of unity to establish social stratification and groups. However, Emiko is “something else” and “different.” She removes herself from humanistic value judgments as she is “optimal in her own way.” A posthuman genetically hybrid birdlike figure, her embodiment fractures such humanistic unities. As stated by Vint in her interview, the human-animal boundary is used as a hierarchical structure to segregate humanity from itself: to racialize and gender bodies. Utilizing Emiko’s animal DNA and characteristics, Bacigalupi blurs this boundary within the posthuman figure to further destabilize dystopian hierarchies in the Thai Kingdom.Similar to Lai’s fiction, which is influenced by animal representations in Chinese mythology, such as the fox or the snake, in order to “[address] speculative fictional issues of human/animal hybridization through gene splicing,” Bacigalupi also employs animal imagery. As such, Emiko metaphorically becomes a falcon, a predatory bird with great speed and eyesight that functions as a symbol of “supreme power and ability” in Asian culture.11 In ancient Asian arts, falcons, or hawks, were typically depicted in a dualistic manner: either as “a hawk that belongs to a skilled owner sitting on a gorgeously decorated perch or on the arm of the well-dressed owner going out to hunt” or as “a hawk in the wild, perched on the branch of a tree in a forest or fiercely pursuing prey.”12 These traditional depictions are encountered within Bacigalupi’s text as two sides of the same coin: as a posthuman prostitute, like an animal, simply “used” by her wealthy masters, until she becomes falcon-like: a wild bird, free of its jesses, flying in the forest where the New People enclave is supposedly located and using her skills and power to survive and hunt prey. After realizing that she can finally fly free and embrace her “animal” side, the powers that be of course attempt to punish her for such fancies. Emiko returns to the brothel one final time to gain any information on the New People village. Instead, in what some critics consider a gratuitously graphic scene, she is abused, gang-raped, and traumatized. In a private session for a high-level political leader of the Thai Kingdom and his companions, her violation is worse than ever before as the “men cheer at Emiko’s degradation, encouraging escalation, and Kannika [another prostitute], flushed with excitement, begins to devise new tortures.”13In contrast to the feminist utopian sisterhoods mentioned in the Lai and Vint interview, the worst instance of sexual violence against a woman is caused by another woman. In order to elevate her own subjugated position within Thai society, Kannika sides with her oppressors to gain some semblance of power in the domination of those considered inferior. Instead of her previous reactions that simply endure her abuse, Emiko’s newfound agency—the blurring of animal-human boundary and points of resistance—enables her to enact revenge and kill her powerful abusers. By the end of the novel, the tension between the two opposing political factions in the Thai kingdom culminates in an open conflict, when Emiko kills the Thai Kingdom’s revered leader in this act of self-defense. As a result, Bangkok suffers civil strife, and suffers the intentional sabotage of the city’s main defense against the rising sea levels and floods: its levees and pumps.Emiko’s posthuman status, though, allows her to inhabit a city destroyed by human and natural disasters. After the flood, she survives in Bangkok where no human could, as the copious amounts of otherwise deadly water allow her life to become “bearable” as she is cleansed by the rain and “eats well and sleeps easily.”14 Emiko thrives in the abandoned remains of human civilization, where in fact she is better suited. This natural disaster has provided her a geographical space to originate a different form of life and build a distinctive future. She is no longer obsessed with the fantasy of reaching the New People enclave and, instead, accepts the damaged natural world and its wild imperfection and fragmentation as an unlimited and inclusive space for the posthuman Other.This space becomes the real materialization of Emiko’s hope. The blank slate created in Bangkok for Emiko and the posthuman to reinscribe evokes Frantz Fanon’s notion of decolonization through the tabula rasa: a radical shift in the social structure “changed inside out,” altering the (natural) order of the world into “total disorder.”15 Fanon considers the destructive violence incurred by the tabula rasa to allow those petrified or socially dead to acquire a new identity and create inclusive spaces for oppressed minorities. In this case, the posthuman figure is a symbol of ambiguous hope: Emiko has successfully liberated herself from the dystopian society, yet the blank slate does not inherently provide a utopian promise, as the mistakes of humans can be repeated by posthumans or worse. As Vint states in the interview, “Hope pertains not just to one’s own particular circumstances being transformed for the better; to think so is the risk of that impulse being attached to regressive fantasies.” Thus, it is imperative that Emiko not only take advantage of this tabula rasa for herself but transform it for the greater good.What is clear is that humanity is no longer a symbol of hope since human beings in the novel have nearly eradicated the species and colossally damaged nature. Therefore, any hope of renewal must be found by eliminating the human and turning to the posthuman figure. As such, Bacigalupi constructs a space for ethical posthumanism. According to Sherryl Vint in Bodies of Tomorrow, ethical posthumanism moves away from the concept of humans as “the only subjects in a world of objects.”16 Vint proposes that “an ethical posthumanism must work against this boundary of the human from the nonhuman, refusing this final ground of abjection” that acknowledges the self’s material connection to the world and nature and embraces “multiplicity and partial perspectives, a posthumanism that is not threatened by its others.”17 Thus, there is no need for the rigid, limited social structure found in dystopia. Emiko can create an alternative to the Thai Kingdom’s society. Ultimately, she is able to liberate herself from her inferior position in the natural order with her posthuman power, leaving readers with hints of utopian promise knocking at the door.